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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

This looks like a professional grade tool for their target market at a reasonable price point. If you’re trying to write 100s or 1000s of cards per day the amortized cost of this becomes negligible very quickly.

For those complaining that it’s more expensive than cobbling together USB hubs and multi-port readers from Amazon: You’re definitely not the target market. If you have a scaled manufacturing or even prototyping facility, having an engineer spend a couple days cobbling together scripts and instructions to do the same thing as well as maintaining it on the floor will cost more than this device. On the other hand, if your a hobbyist with plenty of time but limited budget then this isn’t for you.

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I agree. We only do on the order of 20 to 50 a day but only a few times a year. Having something like this would help a lot. Not that it can't be done on a computer but when in a rush and perhaps traveling or in the field having a one-to-many sd card cloner / writer is super helpful. The price isn't that bad considering people pay that much for a new cell phone each year.

You are spot on. We initially started by literally 'cobbling together USB hubs and multi-port readers from Amazon' but we couldn't hit the performance we wanted so we ended up designing our own hardware.

EtcherPro uses the standard open source Etcher app so hobbyists can use USB hubs to build their own drive duplicator on a budget.

- EP lead designer

> For those complaining that it’s more expensive than cobbling together USB hubs and multi-port readers from Amazon: You’re definitely not the target market.

Then again, if I was wanting to burn 1000s of cards a day, I would probably do what everybody else does and create/contract an actual manufacturing process. This seems to fall in the niche between somebody that just happens to flash a lot of images and businesses at scale that do 1000s and it seems like it's a bit of a perilous position.

> Then again, if I was wanting to burn 1000s of cards a day, I would probably do what everybody else does and create/contract an actual manufacturing process

In practice, lead times are long enough and release cycles short enough that it can make sense to have these devices at point of manufacture so you can ship with the latest software image.

Imagine you order 10,000 pre-flashed SD cards for your project but half way through the production run you decide you need to change the software. Do you discard thousands of SD cards and re-order a new batch? Or do you buy a couple of these and simply add it as another station on the assembly line so you can get back to production right away?

If you are ordering 10k + pre-flashed SD cards then you are an enterprise. On first run the user must download an installer to download the most recent bugs and features. That is how things are done.

It doesn't sound like you have much experience in manufacturing.

No, you don't pull a run of hardware mid-run to rev their firmware unless there is an absolute shitstorm which would also just be handled by the manufacturing process i.e. why would you ship the "bad" cards to your office or some such scenario rather than run them again through the same at-scale manufacturing process?

Anyways, as somebody already pointed out, the vast majority of these cases would be handled by live updates.

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